Klobuchar Opening Remarks on Increasing Domestic Consumption of U.S.-Grown Agricultural Products

WASHINGTON - U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry, delivered the following opening statement at the Agriculture Committee hearing: Increasing Domestic Consumption of U.S.-Grown Agricultural Products.

A rough transcript of Klobuchar's full opening statement is available below and a video can be downloaded here.

Ranking Member Klobuchar: Mr. Chairman, and thank you for holding this important hearing this afternoon, whether a farmer grows corn and soybeans or blueberries and apples, our farmers need domestic marketing opportunities to stimulate growth throughout our country.

They need it now, now more than ever, as you pointed out, Mr. Chairman. A few ideas I toss out there. One is E-15, making that permanent and year round. There is bipartisan support for this, and I want to thank Senator Fischer and Duckworth and so many others who have worked on this issue. We need to get it done. A bipartisan farm bill seems to me a vehicle where we can get it done, but there may be others as well.

We can also expand domestic opportunities by investing in local markets, by purchasing fresh produce and meat from small and mid-sized farmers. We can support local supply chains and families. I was frustrated to see the administration cancel the popular local food purchasing assistance program last year, and I hope that we can reinstate this investment. We can also invest in organic agriculture, expand support for rural businesses, and invest in research, develop new revenue streams for farmers.

I've long supported bipartisan efforts to grow new domestic production of sustainable aviation fuel, bio-based products and industrial hemp. There's a lot more we can do on hemp. That's a subject for another day, but this is a growing market that we should be looking at, and not going backwards, on these opportunities to provide farmers with innovative sources of revenue amidst a difficult farm economy. It's no secret that we are exploring these domestic market opportunities we would be anyway, but the chaos caused by our tariff and trade policy is causing many, many issues.

I appreciate my colleagues on both sides of the aisle who have joined me in pushing back on the tariffs. The impacts of the tariffs record high input costs and the need to invest in domestic markets are top of mind for Minnesota farmers.

I recently held two roundtables - one in southern Minnesota, and one in Breckenridge in western Minnesota - where I heard directly about the uncertainty facing our farmers and ranchers, and that is the hardest thing for so many of them: the tariff changes. It goes up. It goes down. They don't know what to plant. They don't know what to invest in. And then in the end, it gets harder and harder. So the best thing we can do, in addition to having less of these tariffs and have them much more targeted - using a chisel or a hammer instead of a sledge hammer - would be good.

And the second thing would be a bipartisan five-year farm bill that meets the moment. Farmers need reliable access to credit, modernized conservation programs and new uses for their products. These ideas could be included in a bipartisan farm bill.

And at the same time our farmers and ranchers are struggling, we also have families struggling. Paychecks are stretched because of rising grocery and health care costs and now gas costs, just as our anti-hunger programs face the steepest cuts in a generation, we must do something here - and I did not like the way these state shifts went on SNAP. I understand that our colleagues would engage in some cuts to SNAP this last summer, and I'm hoping we can get to a better place.

I think it's really important for people to know that because of the way this was structured, with the highest error rate states getting off scot-free, 10 of them, and the lowest error rate states, of course, not having to pay, there's a whole bunch of us in the middle, as in the entire Midwest, they're going to see enormous cost shifts to our states, and in some states, counties.

That is why the bipartisan National Governors Association - I'm not talking about the Democratic Governor's Association - the National Governors Association has come out with a proposal to delay these cost shifts. The National Conference of State Legislatures and other state and local officials, we should give the states the time to get their error rates down, and we should delay these cost shifts, and we certainly shouldn't be benefiting high error rate states over ones that have lower error rates. So I hope as we look at a farm bill, and I know there's work being done over in the House, that we include some corrections to what happened last summer. So thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I look forward to today's discussion.

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